Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The holistic haircut

WhenÂ I used to live in England, having a haircut was one of those chores – like going to the dentist – that I always put off until it was absolutely necessary. I would wait until a positively Hoggard-ian mop of hair had grown upon my head before going to the barbers, the sort of thing you needed windscreen-wipers to see out of.

India, where real men get massages

Not anymore. The Oriental male has always been a more pampered creature than the Anglo-Saxon of the species, but three years of living in India has persuaded me irrevocably of the merits of barbering the Indian way.

Whenever I walk into my regular place, there are always one or two corpulent males being attended to by a bevy of beauticians, manicuring fingers and toes, sawing furiously away at horny feet and massaging richly spiced oils into tired scalps.

I can't say I've cast off my Britishness to the point of submitting to a pedicure, but even the most straightforward haircut – which I enjoyed today – is a magnificent production.

From time to time I race into the hairdressers, late for a meeting and trying to squeeze the whole thing into a 15 minute window. I ask for the 'bahut-jaldi' – superfast – cut, but whenever I do my regular scissor-smith regards me with a mixture of pity and loathing and completes the operation in a huffy silence. Rushing around is an embarrassing, Western way to live.

Today, however, I had a full 45 minutes to spare before I needed to meet my lunch date and was therefore able to indulge in the full service.

It begins with small talk – my Hindi is good when it comes to the terrible weather and the soaring price of lentils – before Bhatia the barber begins to expertly shave and trim my locks.

Fresh razor blades are broken from old fashioned paper wraps and each extraneous hair his is greeted in person and nipped away to leave a hairline crisp enough to cut your finger on.

But the cut is only the beginning. When that is done – usually 25 minutes – the huge, bull-like man with a scar on his neck, who until now has been sweeping up the trimmings, fetching glasses of cold water and replenishing the cut-throat razor, metamorphoses into a rustic masseur.

He begins – a little oil on the palms – with the head massage.

Scrunching, dabbing, drumming, kneading and pressing until, at one point, it actually feels as if he's trying to crushing the entire skull like a watermelon fit to burst. It is an awesome, mind-transporting sensation when carried out by practiced hands.

Then he attacks the shoulders, the upper and lower back, the arms and finally the hands, squeezing and tugging each finger in turn with a wrestler's grip.

The whole performance finishes with an ice-cold towel pressed firmly onto the face that has the effect of absorbing all that masseur's energy and leaves you feeling like you've emerged into a better, brighter world.

When I think of the charmless, moustachioed whimp who used to cut my hair in London, charging fifteen times the price for about a twentieth of the service, the thought of returning to live in grey old London leaves me under a pall of depression.

And on that relaxed and pampered note, I shall bid you farewell for the weekend.

I'm off to Srinagar – it's a Bank Holiday in the UK – to escape the wretched furnace that is Delhi in midsummer and watch the kingfishers diving on Dal Lake. Back with you on Tuesday.